(2011) What Lies Beneath

by Sarah Rayne

  Whatever her real emotions, Fay had gone docilely enough to Priors Bramley. It would not be for long, Dr Martlet said privately to Colm and Julius. A few months, perhaps. A year at the very most. Colm had gone with her, of course, and Serena had detailed one of the older maids from the London house to live at the manor with them. She was a rather dour woman, a Miss Crossley, not very popular with the other servants, unlikely to gossip in the village or form foolish friendships with local people. When Fay died, Crossley could either be retired on a small pension or she could remain at the manor if she wanted, as a caretaking housekeeper.

  The family continued to use Cadence Manor for the summer and for the big Christmas house parties Julius liked to give and Serena always tried to avoid. She had thought Fay’s presence would provide an excuse, but Julius said the west wing was remote and contained, so Fay could safely be left to her seclusion. Life must go on as normal and the rest of the manor was big enough to house their guests. As for Jamie, he need never know the real facts, said Julius. Looking back, Serena was glad they had kept the truth from Jamie. He had been only a toddler then, and for him to see the nightmare thing his mother had become was unthinkable.

  The only unsatisfactory thing in the plan was Fay herself, who must needs confound Dr Martlet’s prediction and linger for four long years. When she eventually died, a trustworthy and incurious undertaker from London came down the next day and arranged a discreet funeral at a church some ten or twelve miles away. St Luke the Hospitaller, it was called, and there was a brief private burial. Julius attended, but Serena was in London. She did not travel down for the funeral because it was important not to attract too much local attention. Also, it was a hot August that year, and the journey would have been exhausting.

  And then, more than a decade later, Fay’s ghost returned. A diseased ghost. Because it turned out that the light-minded slut had slept with Julius. She had actually allowed Serena’s husband into her bed, and the seeds of her filthy, unpredictable illness had been passed to Julius. And, years later, Julius had given it to Serena so that Serena herself was now under sentence of death, living in seclusion at Cadence Manor, exactly as Fay had done.

  She wandered through the rooms, finding grisly traces of Fay everywhere. At the back of a housemaid’s cupboard was a stack of mirrors, five or six of them, hidden away so Fay could not accidentally catch a glimpse of her reflection. In the bedroom that had been hers, shawls and veils were folded in a drawer. Lavender bags had been tucked into the folds, but when Serena opened the drawer the indefinable scent of disease and death drifted out.

  That’s what’s ahead of me, she thought. They’ll have to hide the mirrors and keep the curtains closed. Eventually I’ll give orders that the gas jets burn at the lowest possible glimmer even on the darkest of evenings.

  A few years ago Julius had wanted to install electricity in the manor, but it had turned out to be too expensive for the old fabric and, remembering this, Serena was grateful. She was not grateful for very much else, though.

  The west wing where Fay had lived for those four years had long since been rearranged and cleaned out, and nowadays Colm lived there, pottering contentedly among his books. If his dead wife’s shade walked those rooms, he did not seem to notice. He and Serena shared lunch or dinner a few times after her arrival, but she had never found Colm easy to talk to and he seemed to have grown nervous and almost hermit-like with the years. He was still looked after by the dour Miss Crossley, who had nursed Fay all those years ago; Dora said there had been a few battles in the kitchen between Mrs Flagg and Old Crosspatch.

  ‘Her name is Miss Crossley,’ said Serena.

  Dora said that was as maybe, milady, but to everyone downstairs she was Crosspatch, and was there anything else needed tonight, milady, on account of it being her night off. She and Hetty were going along to the Red Lion.

  ‘No, nothing else,’ said Serena, and Dora went off, very pert, for her evening. Serena heard them giggling as they went under her window and hoped they were not heading for trouble. Dora had always been a good, well-behaved girl, but Hetty was apt to be flighty, there was no denying it.

  After the first few weeks, Serena and Colm, by tacit agreement, kept to their own part of the manor; Colm with his books and his memories and ghosts in the west wing, Serena in the east wing. Really, it was better that way; conversation at meals could be so tiring and Serena had noticed Colm looking at the wine and brandy decanters, which Flagg now placed at her hand without being asked. It was nothing whatsoever to do with Colm if she took a glass or two of good wine with her lunch and dinner, or if she enjoyed a little brandy after her food. Brandy was good for the digestion, everyone knew that.

  Sometimes she thought the disease was not progressing at all; sometimes she even thought it was retreating. But then a morning would come when the unforgiving sunlight poured into the rooms and she was forced to hunt out the shawls and veils to wear, or to lie in sick despair on her bed, her skin on fire, her bones in grinding agony.

  And every day the child Julius had forced on her, that black knot of disease inside her body, grew a little bigger and a little stronger. I hate you, said Serena to the child. Why couldn’t you have died that day with your twin? Why can’t you die now, before you’re born? The words whispered inside her head like a secret echo. Die before you’re born . . . Die before you’re born . . .

  At some point, the whisper changed to, I’ll make sure you die before you’re born . . .

  The scullery at Cadence Manor was, as Mrs Flagg often said, a gloomy old place.

  ‘Dismal from floor to ceiling, and always has been, and how I’m to make a meal fit to send to table on this rusting old stove is a mystery.’

  They were just sitting down to their midday dinner – a good leg of roast pork it was, and for once the Crossley woman had unbent sufficiently to help out. Flagg was serving himself apple sauce, when there was a cry from the main hall, following by a bumping tumble.

  ‘Sounds like the mistress,’ said Flagg. ‘Taken a fall, that’s my bet. We’d best see what’s happened.’

  What had happened was that Lady Cadence, poor soul, stumbling around in the dim, curtained hall, had tripped at the head of the stairs and gone headlong down to the half-landing. The sound even brought Mr Colm from his part of the house, spectacles pushed up onto his forehead, his hair rumpled round his head like an astonished baby.

  Lady Cadence was lying a bit twisted, saying weakly she did not know how it had happened; she had been coming down to the dining room, and she must have stumbled over that bit of rug at the top of the stairs.

  Miss Crossley was dispatched to send a message to the local doctor to come up to the manor at once, while Hetty and Dora carried the poor mistress to her bed, with Flagg and Mr Colm in anxious attendance.

  Later in the servants’ room they all agreed it was fortunate that all madam had suffered was a sprained ankle. With the child due to be born so soon it was a miracle she had not done some irreparable damage to it.

  Miss Crossley told Hetty to make sure no dangerous bits of rug were left lying around for folk to trip over, and when Hetty declared hotly that she had not left no rug nowhere, Miss Crossley warned Mrs Flagg the lower servants were becoming impudent.

  The news that Sir Julius had died in a heathen country nobody had heard of reached Cadence Hall shortly after Christmas. Lady Cadence had a letter telling the news, and asked Flagg to let the servants know.

  There had been some sort of funeral service. For once Mrs Flagg and Miss Crossley were united in hoping it had been a proper Christian burial because you never knew what might go on in those outlandish places. Mr Crispian’s letter had asked if a memorial service could be arranged at St Anselm’s, so Flagg was sent down to the village to ask the vicar please to come up to the manor to discuss this.

  The service took place in early January and they all attended it except Miss Crossley, who had to stay behind with Lady Cadence. Madam would have liked to go, said the Crosspatch,
but of course the icy weather made it inadvisable in her condition. Dr Martlet, who had travelled down from London, said there was no question of her attending, even though St Anselm’s was only a five-minute drive into the village. Lady Cadence must stay in the house on her bed, he said firmly.

  She stayed there until the birth of the child a few weeks later. It was a boy, and everyone was very thankful that he seemed sound and whole. A child torn from its twin in the womb, and whose mother had tumbled down the stairs only a few weeks earlier, might have been damaged in some unthinkable way.

  * * *

  Serena named the child Saul, for no other reason than that she thought the name unusual and pleasant, and he was christened at St Anselm’s on an early spring day with crocuses starring the fields.

  Recovering slowly from the birth, Serena had the feeling that Saul hated her. He cried when she went near him, and struggled if she tried to feed him. Dora, who had brothers and sisters, took over his care, along with a village girl engaged by Miss Crossley. Serena was aware of guilty relief that she need have very little to do with him. Sometimes she thought Saul, even at this age, had a deep sense of loss that he could not understand – a loss for the small barely formed little thing that had not survived. When he cried it seemed to her there was an uncontrolled and frustrated fury in the sounds.

  But Dr Martlet told her Saul was healthy and sound. There were no signs of him having inherited the disease both his parents had suffered from, he said firmly.

  Serena believed him until one bright May afternoon when sunlight streamed into the nursery and she saw, for the first time, the faint tracery of scars around Saul’s mouth.

  Jamie Cadence’s Journal

  There’s no point pretending I behaved well during those weeks in Edirne when the food supplies were so low. Everyone around me thought I was wonderful, but actually I was behaving appallingly. I was selfish and self-centred, and I used my mutilation shamelessly to make sure I got the best of the food there was – and there wasn’t much of it for anyone. The Pasha’s men stood guard over the stores, and people subsisted on handfuls of rice and bowls of some liquid concoction I believe contained boiled-up vegetables – mostly onions, from the smell of it.

  But I was an invalid, a victim of misguided hatred, and everyone was sorry for me. I was given the best of everything.

  The days blurred into one another. My mouth was healing; sometimes I still spat blood but that lessened as the weeks went by. The pain was much easier as well, although I didn’t let them know that. I gave a performance of a man nightly suffering the torments of the damned.

  But there’s one day I’ll always remember and that was the day I demanded a mirror. They made excuses at first, pretending there were no mirrors to be found, saying they had forgotten and would bring one later. But in the end they gave in.

  I have a half-memory of someone – I think it was Gil – surreptitiously turning down the oil lamp. He might as well not have bothered, because let’s not pretend about this: I was deformed. There’s no other word for it. There were – and are – appalling scars round my mouth and although most of the torn flesh had healed, even then, it had done so lumpishly, twisting my mouth into something dreadfully close to a snarl. For several appalling moments, in the erratic light of the oil lamp, it was as something from one of the ancient grisly fables of the world’s dark ages stared out at me from the glass – or a mistake, occasionally made by nature, such as can sometimes be seen shambling pitiably through freak sideshows . . .

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ said Crispian, watching me, and I looked at him and felt the familiar surge of hatred towards him. Because it was bad, it was very bad indeed. ‘You’ll grow accustomed,’ he said. ‘And there’ll be small tricks – little illusions you can use. A scarf, a deep-brimmed hat.’

  ‘Even easier, grow a beard,’ said Gil.

  The beard turned out to be not possible – the flesh around my mouth had been so badly damaged the hair didn’t grow. I didn’t come to terms with how I looked then, and I never have. Perhaps I haven’t tried hard enough to accept the results of what was done to me.

  I see I haven’t mentioned the darkness for the last few pages of this journal. It didn’t trouble me in the weeks following the punishment, but it was still there. I knew when I had completely healed it would flex its claws and rip into my mind. And on the day I saw my altered reflection for the first time, it seemed to me that I had somehow been turned inside out: that the inner darkness I had struggled against had been scraped away from inside my skin and smeared over my face for the world to see.

  Crispian found a child’s slate and chalk, so I could write down anything I wanted to say. Never anything about being mistaken for a spy – I never referred to that. It would have been too easy to spin an elaborate tale and make some vital, damning mistake along the way. So I never once referred to it. No explanations or apologies.

  It was soon apparent that no one believed the spy accusation. Or did Raif? Yes, I think he was suspicious. But Crispian and Gil and the other English people in that beleaguered city certainly thought I had been pursuing one of my quests for knowledge – music or some obscure area of Eastern art – and that I had given the wrong impression to the wrong people. A tragedy, they all said. Absurd to imagine someone so quiet, so scholarly – never a trouble to anyone – could be involved in spying. Appalling that an innocent man had endured such extreme brutality. They said it several times to one another, and also to Crispian, and then they felt they had assuaged their own consciences and went off to deal with getting through a siege in the depths of winter.

  I should point out to anyone who hasn’t journeyed to the Turkish-Greek borders that winter there is not a pleasant experience. Winter in England can be rather cosy – roaring fires and mulled wine, spiders’ webs frozen into exquisite lace patterns on frosty mornings, and hollied Christmases with laden dinner tables. That’s if you have money, of course. If you’re poor, you shiver in doorways and beg in the streets, and hate the pampered rich with their fur-lined gloves and warm houses.

  There was nothing cosy about that winter in Edirne, with the war raging and food supplies dwindling by the hour. Inside the fort huge fires were built in the old stone hearths and even in the inner courtyard, but they didn’t do much to combat the unforgiving iron coldness. Christmas was celebrated in a rather bleak fashion among the European community. I didn’t go to the festivities; I wrote on the slate that I was in too much pain that day. Crispian and Gil went and said later it had been a brave attempt at merry-making but not very successful. A few people had tried to sing carols but nobody had joined in with any real enthusiasm. There had been tiny measures of a fiery drink that Crispian said tasted of aniseed and would probably make him sick, but that Gil said was ouzo, and perfectly palatable. As to what the food had been, they had no idea.

  I wrote, ‘Meat?’

  ‘Well, there was definitely some sort of meat,’ said Gil. ‘But whether it was horse or donkey, or whether they’d caught a Bulgar and boiled him, I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Whatever it was you had two helpings,’ said Crispian.

  ‘And I was glad to get it,’ said Gil. ‘By the end of the Twelve Days we might be eating rat. Raif says some of the soldiers are setting up a shooting alley outside the cellars. Don’t shudder, Crispian. Rat is probably regarded as a great delicacy in some parts of the world. Jamie probably knows which ones,’ said Gil, glancing at me.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Well, whatever it is, we might have to eat the rats before they eat us,’ said Gil. ‘Because I don’t think the food’s going to last out much longer.’

  ‘The Pasha will surrender soon,’ said Crispian confidently. ‘He’ll have to.’ He was as arrogant as ever. I suppose he couldn’t imagine he would be expected to endure this siege for long.

  ‘Lay you five pounds the old boy doesn’t surrender until the fifty days are up,’ said Gil. ‘Those were his orders and he’ll follow them to the letter.’

/>   ‘Done,’ said Crispian promptly.

  I nearly took Gil’s bet, but later I was glad I hadn’t because Gil was right. The Pasha followed orders almost to the hour, and did not surrender the fortress and Edirne until the end of March. But it was a grim three months. By the end of January people were gaunt and hollow-eyed, and – let’s not be squeamish – rather smelly. What water there was – mostly taken from wells – had to be preserved for drinking. Sanitation was primitive in the extreme, which was unfortunate in light of the onion broth that still appeared at almost every meal. It can have very dramatic effects on the human gut, onion broth. The entire fort – probably the entire town – stank to high heaven by the time February was under way.

  Living inside a fortress that’s being besieged is an extraordinary experience. I’ve tried to think of a parallel, but I don’t think there is one. Not even prison compares to it. The sense of isolation is absolute. There are no newspapers or letters, no communication with the outside world at all. The only thing that came to us from beyond the city’s confines was the sound of the guns and cannons constantly bombarding the city. People died and were wounded; families were torn apart, there was wailing of grief and anger on all sides, and dozens of small fires broke out from the shelling, and caused minor damage.

  By the end of February Gil and the soldiers really were shooting the rats, because people were ready to eat anything. I don’t know if I actually ate any rat, but I wouldn’t be surprised. There comes a point when you’re so agonizingly hungry – when your stomach is twisted by cramps all the time – that you don’t question what’s on the plate; you just wolf it down.